[Discussion] Thoughts on owning books
Aug. 6th, 2024 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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booknookCrossposted to my journal.
I've always liked books as objects. I'd like to be a person who owns books, which is distict from being a person who reads books. I haven't been able to be as much of a person who owns books as I would have wished to, both because my income used to be very small and because that very small income meant having small living quarters. No space for multiple bookshelves; no money for buying the bookshelves; no money for buying the books.
Things have since changed. While I don't have enough space to have very many bookshelves, nor the money to fill very many bookshelves, I am solidly middle class in terms of income these days, and that does mean an increased book budget. Ebooks help, too. They are cheaper and take up less space, and while they don't give me the same joy that physical books do, they are still books.
The thing is, I'm also a person who doesn't like to own things they don't use. I don't want to have something just to have it, and that includes books both physical and electronic. "If I'm not reading those books, why do I have them?" asks the minimalist me, while the part of me that likes owning nice things sputters, "But, books!"
But what does it mean to read books? What does it mean to have use of them? It's not quite as simple as just reading them right now, or rereading them regularly. Case in point: Captive Prince.
Captive Prince by C.S. Pacat is one of the first ebooks I ever bought. Calibre says the date I added it to my library is October 24, 2015, though I must have actually bought it some time before that, probably in 2014. For some reason, I didn't feel like reading it, and I kept not feeling like reading it until spring 2024, when I felt like reading something that would be a bit grittier than what I'd been reading but that would still give me my romance fix. Captive Prince, with its laundry list of content warnings, seemed like a good fit, and it was. I read the whole trilogy in two days. That's how much I loved it.
If I had bought a physical copy of Captive Prince, would I have culled it at some point, thinking I was never going to read it? Would I have felt that ten years is surely too long for a book to take up valuable bookshelf space? If I had, I wouldn't have had it on hand when I finally was in the mood for it, and that would have been a shame.
I buy most of my novels in ebook form these days, so I rarely need to worry about having to buy a new release immediately for fear of its going out of print. And yet, it isn't difficult to imagine ebooks suddenly being unavailable either, especially when published by small publishers or the authors themselves. It isn't even difficult to imagine an ebook being removed because pressure has been brought to bear on the publisher or the author to do so for one reason or another. At that point, piracy becomes the only option, since getting a second-hand copy of an ebook-only release is impossible.
I indicated that this post was a discussion post. I don't know what I'm discussing, precisely, so if you have thoughts on the vaguely defined topic of "owning books", I'd love to hear them. If I have any conclusions I've come to here, it's this: I just really love books.
I've always liked books as objects. I'd like to be a person who owns books, which is distict from being a person who reads books. I haven't been able to be as much of a person who owns books as I would have wished to, both because my income used to be very small and because that very small income meant having small living quarters. No space for multiple bookshelves; no money for buying the bookshelves; no money for buying the books.
Things have since changed. While I don't have enough space to have very many bookshelves, nor the money to fill very many bookshelves, I am solidly middle class in terms of income these days, and that does mean an increased book budget. Ebooks help, too. They are cheaper and take up less space, and while they don't give me the same joy that physical books do, they are still books.
The thing is, I'm also a person who doesn't like to own things they don't use. I don't want to have something just to have it, and that includes books both physical and electronic. "If I'm not reading those books, why do I have them?" asks the minimalist me, while the part of me that likes owning nice things sputters, "But, books!"
But what does it mean to read books? What does it mean to have use of them? It's not quite as simple as just reading them right now, or rereading them regularly. Case in point: Captive Prince.
Captive Prince by C.S. Pacat is one of the first ebooks I ever bought. Calibre says the date I added it to my library is October 24, 2015, though I must have actually bought it some time before that, probably in 2014. For some reason, I didn't feel like reading it, and I kept not feeling like reading it until spring 2024, when I felt like reading something that would be a bit grittier than what I'd been reading but that would still give me my romance fix. Captive Prince, with its laundry list of content warnings, seemed like a good fit, and it was. I read the whole trilogy in two days. That's how much I loved it.
If I had bought a physical copy of Captive Prince, would I have culled it at some point, thinking I was never going to read it? Would I have felt that ten years is surely too long for a book to take up valuable bookshelf space? If I had, I wouldn't have had it on hand when I finally was in the mood for it, and that would have been a shame.
I buy most of my novels in ebook form these days, so I rarely need to worry about having to buy a new release immediately for fear of its going out of print. And yet, it isn't difficult to imagine ebooks suddenly being unavailable either, especially when published by small publishers or the authors themselves. It isn't even difficult to imagine an ebook being removed because pressure has been brought to bear on the publisher or the author to do so for one reason or another. At that point, piracy becomes the only option, since getting a second-hand copy of an ebook-only release is impossible.
I indicated that this post was a discussion post. I don't know what I'm discussing, precisely, so if you have thoughts on the vaguely defined topic of "owning books", I'd love to hear them. If I have any conclusions I've come to here, it's this: I just really love books.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-06 11:47 pm (UTC)Something I've started doing in the past year or so (the first time in my life I've made over what is considered "just getting by" in my area) is to buy print copies of ebooks I read and particularly enjoyed. I get 90% of my ebooks from the library but I worry about losing access when files types become obsolete or ebook stores go out of business and you lose your whole library. Some ebooks are available DRM free but not all (not even the majority, I think?) and that doesn't solve the obsolescence problem. (I'm not sure of the legality of reformatting your DRM-free .mobi files to .epub, e.g.)
… on the other hand, something else I've been doing is occasionally buying ebook copies of print books I own but don't want to stuff in my suitcase and haul overseas with me, either because they're too heavy (most of my manga collection) or valuable/out of print (some of my manga collection) and they're safer at my mom's house than in earthquake country.
There are some books I just prefer in print, too. I mostly write picture books and ebooks are not the same reading experience so I am slowly but surely building a collection of my favorites, both as a child reader and as an adult librarian/author. Most of my Judaica collection is in print. (I use my iPad for ereading on Shabbat when I have to but I prefer to read paper books.) Some books are so tied up in the physical experience of the book as an object that reading an ebook version feels… wrong, somehow. I wish I'd dug up my childhood copy of Freak the Mighty while I was home this summer; I was struck by a desire to reread it but I'd really want to read my copy. My library has an ebook on Libby and the school where I work has a print edition but it's not the same trim size and paper type as my copy and it's not my book. There's nothing special about my book (it's not signed or a first printing or anything) except that I read it 100 times when I was a kid.
I really miss that sometimes, too. There are some books that my first encounter with the text was digital and it's just not the same.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-07 12:23 pm (UTC)That whole DRM thing just makes me mad. I think it's unethical to sell only access to books (and other media), especially when the stores make a point of obfuscating the issue. After all, every store I've ever used has a "buy this book" button rather than a "license this book" button. It's deliberate, and it's wrong.
Therefore, I download every single ebook I buy and break the DRM on it regardless of the legality of doing so. It's my book, ethically speaking, and I refuse for it to be held hostage by some corporation.